


The Heart Grows Fonder

by QueenNeehola



Category: Octopath Traveler (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff without Plot, M/M, Octopath Traveler Spoilers, Pining, Post-Canon, Therion Chapter 4 Spoilers (Octopath Traveler)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26630485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenNeehola/pseuds/QueenNeehola
Summary: He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.  He feels restless and lethargic all at once, the urge to busy his hands and mind battling with the desire to do just the opposite and lie in a pathetic lump on the floor.  He’s tired, but sleep doesn’t seem to want to come to him as easily anymore.  The bed is always so cold, but he makes himself too hot tossing and turning and wrapped in Cyrus’s clothes.He’s sick, he decides, despite no fever or sniffles, and picks the least offensive-smelling of the medicines Alfyn had last delivered to them and downs it in one.When Cyrus takes a short work trip away from home, Therion is left to hold down the fort.  He relishes the chance for alone time, plans for so much productivity, but in reality he ends up struggling with something he has never really experienced before...
Relationships: Cyrus Albright/Therion
Comments: 11
Kudos: 58





	The Heart Grows Fonder

“I’ll be fine, Cyrus,” Therion says for the fifth time above the scholar’s rambling voice. This time it’s something about the books in the study and the specific order they’d been piled in, so please be careful about moving them, won’t he? “Now go, or they’ll go without you.”

“They will not,” Cyrus replies, but he looks to the waiting carriage with a small frown nonetheless.

“Well that’s on them, then,” Therion says, smirking as Cyrus turns back to him. “They should escape while they have the chance.”

Cyrus’s frown becomes more pronounced at that, but Therion can easily tell his theatrics from a genuine article. “Are you implying they’d be better off without me?”

“I’m just saying - locked in a room with you and a bunch of dusty old books you’ve never seen before? Yeesh.” Therion grimaces.

“How rude,” Cyrus says, shaking his head, but there’s a hint of a laugh on the words. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We can make room.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want to be Prim’s only source of amusement while you and your buddies are off going nuts in her library.”

Cyrus looks like he’s getting geared up for a rebuke, but Therion just gives him a little push, enough to nudge him over the threshold of the garden gate, and he misses his chance.

“We can visit her properly next time,” Therion assures him. “Together. This is a work thing. I don’t wanna get in the way.”

“You wouldn’t,” Cyrus says.

Therion raises an eyebrow. “Oh, so you wouldn’t be hopelessly distracted by my captivating presence?”

That has Cyrus laughing as planned. Something small pangs in Therion’s chest. It’ll be nice to have the place to himself for a while, but he _is_ going to miss the sound of Cyrus’s laughter. Especially the wheezy giggles when Therion catches him off guard. _Especially_ when he accidentally snorts and they both start laughing even harder.

“I’ll only be gone a couple of weeks at most,” Cyrus says.

“I know.”

“I’ll write if I can find the time.”

“I _know_ , Cyrus,” Therion sighs. “Now get out of here before one of them comes to get you. I can only deal with one annoying scholar at a time.”

Cyrus smiles far more warmly than Therion’s words warrant, and says, “I love you.”

Therion pauses, feeling himself go pink. “...I love you too.”

Cyrus makes it to opening the carriage door before he stops. He drops his bag with a heavy _thunk_ , turns and hurries back to Therion, his jacket billowing in his wake.

Therion sighs, already moving aside to let him past. “What did you forget?”

But Cyrus stops before him and takes him by the shoulders. Therion looks up, cautiously curious.

“This,” Cyrus says, and kisses him.

It’s just a peck on the lips, no different from any of his other goodbye kisses as he leaves for work, except—

“Don’t do that outside where everyone can see,” Therion huffs, shoving at Cyrus’s chest. He feels a more severe heat in his face than before and knows he’s flushing in that particularly flustered way that Cyrus finds endearing. “Margaret across the street already gossips about us.”

“Let her gossip,” Cyrus says.

“She thinks I’m not good enough for you.”

“The woman has never deigned to speak to me a day in her life,” Cyrus says, “so I fail to particularly care what she thinks.”

He leans in for another kiss, but Therion just grabs his face in both hands and squeezes his cheeks into a comically contorted expression.

“ _Go_. And don’t just dump your bag like that. Someone might steal it.”

Cyrus scrunches his nose until Therion releases him. “I doubt anyone would try, with the most brilliant thief in all of Orsterra keeping watch.”

“ _Cyrus_.”

“Alright, alright, I’m going.”

Though Therion is the thief by trade, it is Cyrus who manages to steal a final kiss before he does, eventually, leave.

Therion watches his animated waving from the carriage window until it rounds out of the street and away, and then he’s left blissfully, silently, alone.

* * *

Therion loves Cyrus, but sometimes he is...just _there_ , so much.

When you have been alone for most of your life, especially when people have given you a reason to prefer it that way, it is difficult to get used to being with other people. Travelling with everyone was hard enough for Therion at first, but eventually they’d settled into a rhythm of splitting up in towns, giving him peace at mealtimes, and knowing when he needed space.

All except for Cyrus, it had seemed, and Therion often wonders how much that had to do with how his affection for the man continued to grow, eventually reaching - and then overtaking - his annoyance. If Cyrus hadn’t insisted on fussing over his needs and including him in every meaningless little conversation, he probably wouldn’t have looked at him twice. The thought gives him some pause, these days.

Now, with his perpetually chatty partner gone, Therion has all the time and quiet in the world to do as he pleases.

Maybe he’ll finally give the oven the cleaning it so desperately needs. Perhaps, he thinks on the way up the garden path, he’ll pull some weeds and finally take Mrs. Kinsley up on those vegetable-growing tips she keeps offering him. Tomatoes might be nice. Maybe some herbs, too.

He could finally get to the nightmare-inducing mess in their room, too. Books that Cyrus insists are _important_ and _need to be kept close at hand_ , yet he never seems to look at them any more than he does the ones at the other end of the house, or propping up the plant pot on the kitchen windowsill, or - Gods forbid - actually _in_ his study bookshelves where they belong; and papers strewn across several surfaces, filled top to bottom and front to back with Cyrus’s swooping illegible cursive (and often decorated with coffee rings when neither of them can find a coaster). 

Therion can’t say he’s entirely innocent himself though - Cyrus is nothing if not influential, even accidentally, and now Therion has his own little collection of...junk that has found its home in their bedroom. Old lockpicking tools, a decorative dagger hilt that he’d acquired in Grandport, some trinkets he’d collected on his journey with everyone... In his defence, however, he does try to keep them all in a box and not scattered everywhere.

The clothes, though...those are mostly his. Folding his own laundry is a pain. Cyrus might be particular about his pressed trousers, but Therion has never cared about creases.

He’s just locking the front door and thinking about finally trying to bake that pie the grocer’s wife gave him the recipe for when he catches himself.

Gods above, he’s so... _domesticated_.

Once upon a time he’d have run riot when given a modicum of freedom. Let off the leash. Left unsupervised. He’d have stolen something - several things - from a store or a stall or a house or just from people on the street, lifting their wallets and watches and bracelets from under their noses. At the time he’d thought it was fun. Powerful. Now, as he sees himself in the hall mirror and makes a face at his reflection, he knows it was only because he hadn’t known how to do anything else.

Oh, how things change when you’re around the right people.

* * *

The first day, Therion does clean the oven, his sleeves rolled up and a cloth tied around his nose and mouth as he goes at it with baking soda and vinegar. It takes hours, and by the end his arm muscles are screaming, but when the finished result gleams silver back at him his chest swells with accomplishment.

The second day, Therion goes shopping, because now there is no baking soda or vinegar in the house.

The familiar gaggle of fussy old wives corner him almost immediately, asking how he is without Cyrus, offering him dinners and laundry services and telling him that he’s welcome at their bridge nights any time.

He assures them he can feed and clothe himself - in fact, he has laundry out right now, he better get home and check on it before it starts to rain, and he only manages to wriggle away and flee under the cloudless skies when he promises Mrs. Darlington she can teach him to play sometime.

On the third day - well, on the second night really, the day doesn’t count until the sun comes up - Therion kicks awake from an old nightmare, breathing hard and shuddering under a layer of drying sweat. He turns to burrow into Cyrus’s waiting arms, but of course Cyrus isn’t there. His side of the bed is crumpled from Therion’s tossing and turning, but otherwise untouched.

Therion shuffles over to it and shoves his face into the cold pillow, drawing in a breath filled with the scent of Cyrus’s shampoo, but he lies awake until the sun crawls in through the window, across the floor and into bed with him, and then he gets up.

He finds the day is wasted, the hours simultaneously dragging and slipping through his fingers so that by the time he finds himself again in bed, this time bundled in one of Cyrus’s academy coats, he can’t name a single thing he’s accomplished.

The fourth day is just as much of a loss.

He wakes up late, starving and groggy, and stupidly decides it’s the perfect day to try that pie recipe out.

His second stupid decision is to clean the bedroom, but trying to decipher and collate all of Cyrus’s old notes is a daunting, distracting task, and by the time he remembers the pie it’s too late and it’s charred to a crisp.

He tosses it out and opens all the windows. The smell of smoke is going to be in the curtains for _weeks_.

He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He feels restless and lethargic all at once, the urge to busy his hands and mind battling with the desire to do just the opposite and lie in a pathetic lump on the floor. He’s tired, but sleep doesn’t seem to want to come to him as easily anymore. The bed is always so cold, but he makes himself too hot tossing and turning and wrapped in Cyrus’s clothes.

He’s sick, he decides, despite no fever or sniffles, and picks the least offensive-smelling of the medicines Alfyn had last delivered to them and downs it in one.

When seven days have passed, the letter from Cyrus arrives.

Therion’s heart thrums along with his three-day-long headache as he rips the envelope open, scanning the words with bleary eyes.

_My dearest Therion,_

_I know not how long this letter shall take to reach you, but as I write it I have just finished my sixth day of research. Primrose’s late father’s library is just as incredible as I hoped it would be, though it pains me to see the shelves so empty when once they would have been bursting with content and knowledge from all across the land! It is truly a tragedy that her father’s possessions were redistributed or auctioned after his death. Greed is a terrible affliction. Perhaps upon my return I shall reach out to more of my colleagues, or our mutual friends, and see if we cannot aid in the reconstruction of his collection._

_But I have rambled on! I write to tell you that I hope to be home by the middle of next week at the very latest. I hope you are well in my absence. I’m sure you are. It rather embarrasses me to admit, but I miss you so very much. I feel that I have left my heart at home with you, and I am not entirely myself without it. Without you. Feel free to mock me for my ridiculous romantic notions like you always do as soon as I am home, for only when I hold you once more will this strange discontent subside._

_Until then, my love._

_Ever yours,_

_Cyrus Albright_

Therion feels himself go hot as he finishes the letter. A strange fluttering starts in his chest, and his sight goes blurrier, and he thinks he must really be sick.

The haze across his vision clears a little as he blinks and two fat tears _plop_ onto the paper in his hands.

He knows then that he is sick. He is incredibly, paralysingly, _lovesick_.

He hadn’t realised it until Cyrus put it into plain words, but now it’s so obvious.

_I miss you so very much_.

He’s such an idiot.

* * *

Therion stays by the window. Upstairs, the view looks directly across the front of the house and down the street, giving him a perfect vantage point to watch for Cyrus’s return.

Every carriage in his periphery has his heart thudding louder, every one that turns into the street making it leap into his throat and almost choke him. But there are plenty of people rich enough to travel by carriage in Atlasdam, and every time one just trundles by Therion’s heart sinks back down to tremble weakly behind his ribs.

He _misses_ Cyrus. He misses him so much. More than he had ever thought possible, more than he had ever thought _realistic_ \- spurned maidens wailing about how they yearned to see their erstwhile husbands again had always turned his stomach. Grow up. Get a grip. If you can’t be fine on your own, then there’s no hope for you.

Therion had never known his parents to miss them. He had never bothered to miss Darius. He had courted nostalgia a few times over quiet drinks, but even before he had shoved his knife into Darius’s gut the man had been dead to him. No use harbouring warm feelings for someone who had thrown you off a cliff.

He does miss his friends, but they all write frequently. Tressa passes through Atlasdam often, buying and selling wares, and Ophilia likes to come visit the library when she can get some time away from her duties. Primrose is less than a day’s journey away now too, in Noblecourt...where Cyrus is.

Therion heaves a sigh. _Cyrus_.

He should have just asked to go with him, even if the idea of spending ten hours in a carriage with a bunch of stuffy scholars still makes his skin crawl. Cyrus would have made it bearable. He always does. Cyrus would have held his hand and let him nap on his shoulder, or rattled off some charmingly boring facts about the landscape, or whispered cheeky things into Therion’s ear that made him snort out loud.

Therion catches his reflection, pale in the windowpane and smiling softly at his daydreams. Beyond the glass, the street is empty. He frowns.

* * *

It takes two days after the letter arrives for Cyrus to return.

Therion has given up counting carriages, his eyes unfocused as the sleek black shape turns into the street.

But this one stops.

In a second, Therion is bolt upright, holding his breath.

In another, the carriage door opens, and Cyrus Albright steps out.

In the third second, Therion is down the stairs. By the fourth, he is out the door and hurtling down the path. The fifth second lasts just long enough for Cyrus to hear him approach and turn, his perfect blue eyes widening a fraction before Therion barrels into him, throws his arms around his neck, and kisses him frantically.

Cyrus, to his credit, manages only a small muffled sound of surprise and a moment of awkward stiffness before he melts against Therion, kissing him back with a gentleness that’s in complete contrast with Therion’s urgency. His hand comes to cradle the back of Therion’s head, soft yet secure.

When they part, Therion is panting, and Cyrus looks sweetly flushed.

“What happened to not wanting the neighbours to gossip?” he asks, smiling. A playful smile. A silly, fond smile. A Cyrus smile. Therion’s heart seizes at the sight.

“I don’t care,” he gasps out, surging up onto his toes to press his lips to Cyrus’s cheek, nose, mouth, anywhere in a flurry of rapid kisses, muttering against the skin, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Cyrus chuckles beneath the onslaught of affection, “but I think I ought to—”

A conspicuous cough behind Cyrus cuts his words short. Therion pauses, remembering where he is, and peeks around Cyrus. The carriage door is open, and from it another scholar is leaning; a portly man with more moustache than face, trying his best not to make eye contact as he holds Cyrus’s bag out for him to take.

Therion feels himself go red and mortified, but even as Cyrus turns away to collect his luggage and give polite thanks and farewells to his colleagues, Therion can’t bring himself to let go of him. His fingers find the loose folds of Cyrus’s coat and grasp tight. The silly man never wears it properly, never buttons it up, and Therion is gripped with a publicly unacceptable urge to burrow himself in it as well, to wrap himself around Cyrus and the coat around them both. Surrounded by Cyrus’s scent, and the rhythm of his heart under Therion’s ear.

“Therion?” Cyrus says, and Therion comes back to himself with a bump.

The carriage is gone though he hadn’t heard it depart, and Cyrus is a step further from him than he had been moments before, seemingly stopped from moving further by Therion’s white-knuckled grip on his coat.

“Is everything alright?” Cyrus asks, brows furrowed in endearing confusion. Therion wants to kiss the space between them. Above them. Cyrus’s forehead, framed by his bangs, warm under his lips.

“I’m fine,” he mutters, cheeks hot, hotter as Cyrus disentangles his hand from the coat to take it instead.

* * *

He can’t calm down.

Cyrus insisted on tea and Therion insisted on making it, brewing a full pot as Cyrus busied around unpacking.

Now they are curled together on the couch, with Therion tucked against Cyrus’s side and cradling his mug of tea in his hands. He hasn’t touched it. The porcelain is searing against his palms. He still feels hot, hotter than he has in days, hot in that way that makes him lazy, like when the fire is stoked and the windows and doors are closed and he melts across the couch in one big drip and falls asleep. But the fire is not stoked, and the warmth is not from flames, and Therion feels a strange restlessness in his very core even though he would never dream of moving.

But he missed this warmth, his favourite warmth; the feeling of being totally enveloped in Cyrus. It isn’t quite the same as the fantasy of sharing his coat, and he’s not at the right angle to listen to his heartbeat, but he can rest his head on Cyrus’s shoulder and feel himself rise and fall with each of his breaths.

Cyrus is as Cyrus always is: chatty, going on about his colleagues and Primrose and books and Noblecourt, and though he keeps the arm holding his tea still he can’t resist his habit of gesturing with the other, even as it is wrapped around Therion. His knuckles brush against Therion’s hip with every muted gesticulation, disturbing the tucked edge of his shirt more and more. Therion hopes it will come loose completely so that Cyrus’s fingers will press against his bare skin instead. More heat, ever closer.

“—I think some of them may have even ended up in the library here, so I will need to ask Mercedes to— Therion, are you listening?”

“Mm,” Therion hums. His eyes are half-closed and Cyrus’s voice that he had missed so was like a lullaby, the words all flowing into one another to fill the quiet and ease Therion, to stroke his tense outline into bliss.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Cyrus laughs, and then he moves.

Therion makes a noise of protest.

Cyrus laughs again, soft and fond. He repositions Therion against the back of the couch with the utmost care even as he meets the sharp end of an unimpressed look. “Now, now. I just don’t want you to fall asleep and end up spilling this everywhere.” The mug of tea is plucked from Therion’s loose grip, and then there’s a _clink-clink_ as both cups are set down on the table. Therion wants to say _how could he fall asleep, when his very core is abuzz just from being near Cyrus, when he is already feeling a chill creep into his bones just from their short separation?_ But the words don’t come, and he just makes another pouty sound.

Cyrus comes back into view properly, rearranging himself to face Therion, bringing his legs up to curl beneath him. He reaches forward and takes one of Therion’s hands, fingers gently running over the warm flesh of his palm before he lifts it to press kisses against Therion’s fingertips.

“Now, tell me what I have missed in our fair Atlasdam while I’ve been away,” he says. “What mischief have you been getting up to?”

Therion thinks for a moment, concentrating past the way Cyrus is stroking over his knuckles, then frowns. “Nothing.”

That isn’t true - he had cleaned and tidied, shopped and cooked, been the perfect little househusband as he awaited Cyrus’s return. But they feel like nothing, like blips in the otherwise vast expanse of empty time he had spent simply pacing the house or staring from the windows. Just _waiting_.

“Nothing?” Cyrus repeats, slotting his fingers between Therion’s properly. Their palms touch, still warmed from the tea. A blistering point of contact. Therion shuffles forward.

“Mm,” he agrees. His tongue feels heavy, his voice strange from disuse, but it suddenly feels important to say something. _I missed you_ won’t cut it another time. “It was weird without you here. Quiet.”

He feels himself flush as soon as he admits it, but he feels lighter for it as well. The fidgety feeling in him subsides a little, and when he sinks across the small space between them Cyrus’s arms are already open and waiting for him to collapse into.

Cyrus lips brush across his hair, and he laughs when Therion lets out a contented little sigh. “You complain so much that I never shut up, I thought you’d be happy for the peace.”

Therion shakes his head as much as he can with Cyrus holding him. The second admission comes easier. “ _Too_ quiet. I couldn’t sleep.”

Their hands are still joined, and Therion feels the slight squeeze Cyrus gives his, the tension in his fingers. His cheek, resting atop Therion’s head, shifts as he clenches his jaw through his realisation. Therion knows it’s a subconscious habit, but he turns his face up to nuzzle and kiss at Cyrus’s jawline anyway.

“Oh, dearest,” Cyrus says softly. “I didn’t know. For all I wrote of missing you, I— If you’d only said—”

“ _I_ didn’t know,” Therion responds with a harsher butt of his nose. He feels too hot again, but he keeps speaking anyway, fighting through the impulse to give into the sag in his frame and curl up and fall asleep. “I thought I’d be fine. I guess...we haven’t really been apart before. And I’ve never cared about anyone enough to really miss them before.”

“Oh,” Cyrus says again. Then, “You can come with me, next time, if I have to leave again. I can make a case for you. After everything I did for the academy, _we_ did, they can’t possibly—”

“Cyrus.”

Cyrus quietens, but when Therion makes himself shift to look at him properly, his face is etched with an almost comical seriousness. Therion has to smile, and leans in to kiss him. He squeezes Cyrus’s hand, and Cyrus squeezes back.

He wrangles himself mostly into Cyrus’s lap, somehow. His shirt does end up untucked as he’d wanted, creases be damned - especially with Cyrus’s hands underneath it and spanning the small of his back, fingers dipping beneath Therion’s waistband just enough to tickle the base of his spine.

Therion has Cyrus’s shirt unbuttoned and hanging from one shoulder in response, so he can press himself close against Cyrus’s bare chest and kiss down his neck to his collarbone. The little breaths his lover lets out and the little shudders through his frame beneath Therion are like music and rhythm, and Therion rocks against Cyrus along with them.

But when Cyrus’s hands try to wander, to tamper with Therion’s belt, Therion grabs his wrists and repositions him.

“No?” Cyrus asks.

“No,” Therion answers, kissing along to Cyrus’s shoulder and allowing himself to sink more heavily into his lover’s embrace. He’s so warm. Heavy, but light at the same time. The restlessness is gone now, chased away by honesty and Cyrus’s gentle touches. He feels sleepy. “I just...missed this. Want to stay here. Like this. Touch you.”

Cyrus chuckles. He understands Therion’s drowsy, broken request. He always understands. “Very well.” His hands, safely deposited around Therion’s waist, give him a gentle squeeze.

Therion in turn rests his palms against Cyrus’s chest, his face tucking up under his chin, and it only takes five minutes of Cyrus’s gentle murmuring and massaging to have him fast asleep.

* * *

He doesn’t dream, but when he wakes to the dimness of dusk in the living room and Cyrus softly snoring underneath him, hands slack around him but still warm, still there, it’s such a perfect moment that he barely believes he’s awake at all.

But he is, and he isn’t alone.

He noses back into the comfortable space between Cyrus’s neck and shoulder, settles himself down again and says, to no one but himself this time, “I missed you.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter @QueenNeehola!


End file.
